Drug Overdose Deaths Up in Nearly Every U.S. County
In its second major story in a week, on deaths from drug addiction in the U.S., New York Times writers Haeyoun Park and Matthew Bloch report that deaths from drug overdoses have increased in nearly every county in the U.S. (The U.S. has 3,007 counties.) The tautological reason cited is growth in addiction to prescription painkillers and heroin. The true reason is the lack of a future for young and old, rich and poor, across America, as American statesman Lyndon LaRouche stated forcefully once again to a meeting of his associates on Jan. 19.
The reader of the New York Times article is compelled to think how needed FDR's "alphabet" agencies to train and put the unemployed to work are today, rebuilding the U.S., the rest of the world, and exploring space — all of which human pursuits Obama hates, as shown by his campaign for drug legalization/ decriminalization. These Great Projects, and removing Obama, are the creative challenges which Lyndon LaRouche has called on the American people to raise themselves up to meet.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's newest county level statistics show the largest concentrations of overdose deaths from 2003-2014 were in Appalachia and the Southwest. The number of U.S. drug overdose deaths reached a new high in 2014: 47,055 people, or about 125 Americans daily. This death rate is similar to the HIV epidemic at its peak, Park and Bloch report. However, while Centers for Disease Control Chief of Mortality Statistics Robert Anderson characterized HIV as mainly an urban problem, drug overdoses cut across rural-urban lines; now, death rates from overdoses are growing faster in rural areas than the rates in large urban areas, which historically have had higher rates.
New Hampshire is a state where drug deaths from heroin have skyrocketed, and made it an issue in the Presidential campaign. Timothy Rourke, Chair of the New Hampshire Governor's Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, says, "No group is immune to it — it is happening in our inner cities, rural and affluent communities," the NYT quoted him; in 2014, he said, 326 people died from an overdose of an opioid, a class of drugs that includes heroin and fentanyl, a painkiller 100 times more powerful than morphine. Nationally, opioids were involved in more than 61 percent of deaths from overdoses in 2014; deaths from heroin overdoses have more than tripled since 2010, and are double the death rate from cocaine. Most of the deaths are related to a version of fentanyl, which dealers cut heroin with, and which is more deadly, Rourke says.
In Appalachia, the Times authors say workplace injuries may drive rising addiction, which is heavy in eastern West Virginia and Kentucky. When prescription painkillers' abundance was cut back, addicts turned to heroin. West Virginia has the highest overdose rate in the nation; like New Hampshire, West Virginia has few treatment facilities.
In New Mexico, heroin addiction has been passed down generation to generation; the state has had high death rates from heroin overdoses since the early 1990s. Now addictions are shifting to young people from affluent communities. Sources: "Drug Poisoning Mortality: U.S. 2002-2014 Lauren Rossen, et al., National Center for Health Statistics, CDC.